Cormac McCarthy Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn’t mine. It never has been.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“I look for the words, Professor. I look for the words because I believe that the words is the way to your heart.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“I will do what I promised." He whispered. "No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“He didn't say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say. And I don't remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt.”
-- Cormac McCarthy -
“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
-- Cormac McCarthy
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